“Now as He (Jesus-Yeshua) sat on the Mount of Olives (in Israel), the disciples came to Him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will these things be? And ‘What will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the Age?’” (Matthew 24:3)

“Jesus answered and said to them . . .

‘And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.

See that you are not troubled;

for all these things must come to pass,

but the end is not yet.

(Still before the Rapture and the ‘Apocalypse’)

For nation (ethnic group) will rise against nation (ethnic group),

and kingdom (country) against kingdom (country) . . .

All these are the beginning of sorrows

(Actual translation is “birth pangs”… they will grow closer and closer)

(Matthew 24:6-7)

(Note: The original Greek word translated “nation” was “ethnos,” from which we get our word “ethnic.”)

So, although the world has always had wars, ethnic violence and strife, earthquakes, false messiahs and prophets, famines, and deadly diseases, Jesus Christ (Yeshua Ha’Mashiach in Hebrew) warns us that as a sign that we are entering into the last days we will see each of these increase in frequency and size. Described as “birth pangs,” these “pains” will continue to grow worse and worse, coming closer and closer together, as signs we are preparing to enter the Apocalypse.

Jesus basically said it all: “in the last days, race shall rise against race.” And in the US of A, it is ALWAYS one race rising against the other rather than the other way around.

Here we are, under the “race-riot presidency” of our Cancer-in-Chief. How many of these have we had in the metastatic presidency of Obama? It seems like DOZENS. And when there is one in Baltimore, there are copycat race riots in New York, etc. It’s every BIT as bad now as it EVER was. We don’t have a Watts riot or a Rodney King verdict riot; we’ve got a new one like every week under this failed presidency. At the very least, you have to go back FIFTY YEARS to find as much racial unrest as what Obama and his law-thug Eric Holder have degenerated America into.

He “fundamentally transformed” truth into a wicked lie on BOTH counts.

What does Obama say about all the race riots under his regime and under the regime of his law thug Eric Holder?

Blame Republicans, that’s what he says. Because Obama “transcended” by sinking to the deepest, darkest muck of the very bottom of the sewer. I don’t know, maybe the next president will be as savagely right wing as Obama has been left wing and “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years and end the partisan and ideological wars” by putting all Democrats in death camps. And we’re clearly heading toward the opposing party being crushed like that, because things tend to get worse in a completely broken system – and Obama has completely broken the system. As all the riots document. And every time Obama demonizes his opponents, he continues to prove what a liar he was from the very beginning when he promised to do the very opposite of what he is in fact doing.

The mayor is black. The council is almost two-thirds black. The school superintendent is black. The police chief is black, and a majority of his officers are black.

Race riots inevitably end in contention over what social woes led to the trigger point, with one overarching element: a white power structure ruling a black populace.

Baltimore left behind that vestige of segregation long ago, yet the city nonetheless has been perched on the edge of chaos for much of this week, as African American protesters took to the streets to express grievances over police abuse and urban neglect.

You can add to that the president is black, the Attorney General of the United States is black, the State Attorney for Baltimore (Marilyn Mosby) is black. And so on.

And while the city council is “almost two-thirds black,” let me tell you what they ENTIRELY are: DEMOnic bureauCRAT. EVERY SINGLE council member is a Democrat.

So WHO JUST WHO THE HELL IS ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE DECADES OF INEQULITY??? Hey, you can take your pick; but every single person letting these poor, oppressed black people down to the point where they erupt have two things in common: they are black and they are Democrats.

It’s been almost FIFTY YEARS since a Republican has been elected as mayor in Baltimore. So what do you say? Well, it’s clearly still Republicans’ fault for what happened fifty years ago, I suppose.

Shameless Democrat LIARS claim that the race crisis in Baltimore is the result of blacks being denied educations. Okay, fine – AS LONG AS WE STIPULATE THAT IT IS DEMOCRATS WHO ARE STEALING BLACK CHILDREN’S EDUCATIONS FROM THEM. The FACT is that Baltimore has the SECOND HIGHEST per capital education spending in the nation – and what has happened? Democrats, corrupt, dishonest thieves and looters all, have STOLEN the money for black kids’ education and sent it into their union- and political-slush funds. The Democrat Party is a corrupt exploitation machine, pure and simple.

But let’s shift our focus to this decent, innocent young man whose horrible treatment by the police spawned all of this legitimate racial outrage. Ignoring, that is, that the police themselves, the police chief, the mayor, the lead attorney, etc., etc., are all black.

We’re finding out this latest race riot is just as based on lies and racial agitation and slander and demagoguery as pretty much all the rest of them. For instance:

So gosh, I run from the police and force them to chase me down and tackle me and subdue me. Then I’m in the van banging myself against the walls trying to deliberately injure myself. And holy Moses, I end up with a broken neck.

I cannot for my life understand how someone can claim on the one hand that Gray could not have caused his own injuries but on the other hand his injuries could be caused by a rough ride in the van. At the very least, how can you claim that he wasn’t trying to cause his own injuries at an inopportune moment when the van came to a stop and his attempt to injure himself was augmented by the stop?

This isn’t about “race.” The cops were mostly black. To the extent this is about “decades of inequality,” let’s just be clear that if you hate “decades of inequality,” you damn well better be electing every Republican you see. But what this is mostly about is a career criminal turd who happened to be black.

But the spirit of the black community is the spirit of racial hate and bitterness. They have been indoctrinated by their masters that they are victims, that they cannot possibly succeed, that the system has been stacked against them (you know, by black Democrats who have been demagoguing them for decades to maintain their own power and influence).

“I worked with the police and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech,” Mayor Rawlings-Blake told reporters. “It’s a very delicate balancing act because while we try to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

“We gave them space to destroy.” That sounds just like Obama’s Islamic State policy. I’m sure it will work out just great. Oh, wait, they DESTROYED.

You can’t blame Mayor Rawlings-Blake: she’s only following the Obama Justice Department’s “Never bring a lawsuit against a black” racial bigotry to her city. I mean, to paraphrase Rawlings-Blake, “Let them loot. It’s only justice.”

It is exactly as I have pointed out many times in my articles: liberals have ABORTED fatherhood. At the moment of conception, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FATHER ACCORDING TO LIBERALISM. A man did NOT father a child; THERE IS NO CHILD; THERE IS ONLY A LUMP OF GOOP. There IS no such thing as a “father” or “fatherhood.” There is only the mother.

And she therefore ALONE has the right to choose to murder her own baby. And you watch the wicked Democrat system come holy-hell-unglued to any man who would claim otherwise.

And fathers have responded, “Okay. Whatever. I’m out of here.”

And that is precisely what they SHOULD do. Unless every single Democrat is on his or her way to burning in hell for their role in the murder of sixty million innocent human beings and literally being ten times more murderous and wicked than the damn NAZIS.

The same Democrats who destroyed fatherhood assert, “Hey, you didn’t father ANYTHING, mister. But we’re going to hold you responsible anyway.” But I think history kind of proves how well that’s worked out.

How do you define “mass confusion”? Father’s Day in any black community. It’s an awful joke that has the sad virtue of being completely true.

Democrats want to cite – INcite is a better word – all kinds of socialist rationales to “explain” why the members of their race-based political coalition are so utterly dysfunction: which somehow always boils down to the explanation that it’s because somebody else isn’t having enough of their wealth seized so that someone else can have a bigger welfare check. But THE biggest indicator of poverty is the absence of a father and the absence of a marriage – the two institutions that Democrats have utterly destroyed with their various perversions.

You’ve gotta love the protestors who wave signs that say, “Black Lives Matter.” And judging by the actual FACTS, the only people who don’t believe that black lives matter are BLACK PEOPLE. Given the rage of the black community in Baltimore, and her actions before and after this event under her mayorship, does Mayor Rawlings-Blake think black lives matter? Who ELSE do you blame for this??? Does State Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby – who leads the justice system for the city – think black lives matter??? Whose damn fault is it if the justice system disregards black lives??? You go up the line to our latest black Attorney General or up the line further to our black president, and WHOSE FAULT IS IT THAT BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER???

The black community is desperately sick and as long as Al Sharpton gets a say, it will get sicker and sicker. And if you want to say “black lives matter,” fine. Just make sure you’re telling black people, because they are clearly the ones who actually need to be aware of this.

“No Justice, No Peace,” the signs carried by stupid people read. WHO IS ACTUALLY DENYING JUSTICE??? The very people the idiots carrying the damn signs keep voting for, year after year.

This is NOT a party that somehow stopped being what it always has been to its ugly core; this is a party that learned how to be pathologically racist a different way. They turned themselves into a plantation. And black leaders have been co-opted by the plantation. Democrats continue to use today the very same mindset that they used to justify their slavery in the 19th century: that black people are inferiors who need their superiors to provide for them. You have to feed the negro with eternal welfare; it’s not like he’s human himself to feed himself. While you can argue that the racism of the Democrat Party has “fundamentally transformed” from slavery to Darwinian notion (“On The Origin of Species. by Means of Natural Selection,. or. The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”) that some races are simply less advanced than others and therefore need Government to take care of them. In exchange for their guaranteed vote, of course. Other than Darwin, the Democrat Party embraced the theory of Hegelian socialism – founded of course on the back of racism.

Black people are – under the Democrat Party philosophy – “the white man’s burden.” And that is why it doesn’t matter if it is black people and only black people who are making all the decisions and actually doing all the oppression of black people in Baltimore or any race-inflamed city you want to name that is dominated by historic Democrat control. Because on this Democrat-steeped racial theory you can’t hold black people responsible for ANYTHING. I mean, they’re HELPLESS and INFERIOR. And so it’s GOT to be “blame whitey” for Baltimore.

At least, according to Barack Obama who did precisely that in his vile remarks.

To somebody who has tattoos all over their body, who is defiant, who is disrespectful and who doesn’t even want to work because they have a sense of entitlement that says they are victims, “You owe me.”

Does that sound like a good job-seeking resume?

And don’t tell me those folks don’t exist. They are legion.

So these politicians out on the street trying to justify riots by saying we don’t provide jobs are dishonest in the extreme.

The night before O’Reilly went after the riot excusers who argue that the government needs to provide jobs to these defiant, disrespectful entitlement thug-punks:

“With all due respect,” O’Reilly said, evincing none, “the government cannot create opportunities for young people who are uneducated, disrespectful, and unmotivated.” If the children in Baltimore have been “marginalized” and “misdirected,” he argued, that’s the fault of their parents, not the country, city, or police.

Which makes his decision to blame city officials immediately thereafter rather perplexing. “The city of Baltimore has been run by black politicians and the Democratic Party for decades,” he said, “so who exactly is marginalizing the children?”

But it was the Holy Bible that described to a “T” who these thug-punks were and what they would be like some 2,000 years ago:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God–having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. — 2 Timothy 3:1-5

And “such people” have been rioting in Baltimore and New York. And before that they were rioting in Ferguson, etc.

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

That’s “ministers” as in “The Rev. Al Sharpton.” And the “more rebellious members” are otherwise known today as “black conservatives” who have escaped from the Democrat Plantation and are calling it out for exactly the racist engine that it is and always HAS been.

It is and has always been DEMOCRATS who believe that black lives don’t matter. And to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, they prove it every day and in every way.

And the result is hell. And it will continue to be hell until black people wake up to their sobering senses and realize that they have been led by the nose and duped by lies and throw off the shackles that the Democrat Party has put on them.

One of the latest forms of bondage that Democrats are trying to ensnare blacks with is drug addiction. “Drug addiction helps pimps keep prostitutes virtually enslaved,” we find. And the same thing is true of the Democrat Party and blacks, which is the ultimate predatory form of parasitic relationship par excellence. Which is why the Democrat Party is using every form of slander and demagoguery imaginable to make it as easy as possible to be a voting drug addict today. You want your drugs? Vote Democrat.

We are watching such people rise like cancerous tumors all over the world as what St. Paul described as “the mystery of lawlessness” begins to grow out of control. And decent people watch hell metastasizing and wonder how no one and nothing can/will do anything to stop it.

The black people we are watching burning and looting in riot after riot aren’t rioting and burning and looting because they’re black. They’re doing it because they have drank too often and too deeply of the race-baiting Kool-Aid by the party of fatherlessness and racial demagoguery and bitterness and entitlement to the fruit produced by other people’s hard work. They’ve been voting Democrat lock, stock and goose-stepping barrel for forty years and the more they vote Democrat, the more they fall behind.

This isn’t about “race.” It’s about EVIL. And too many black people have been captured by empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ (Colossians 2:8).

Race is going to continue to rise against race. Because the rioters are ignorant and hateful and everything that St. Paul said they were 2,000 years ago and Bill O’Reilly said they were the last couple of nights. You can call my facts hateful all you want, truth-hater; but that doesn’t change the fact that they are facts and what I’m saying is true.

The problem is that truth is dead in the age of the most documented liar who ever lived. Truth is dead in the age of Obama.

We are watching Democrat policies literally result in literal hell on earth. The Democrat Party is the Party of Antichrist, the Party of the Beast. Period. And they are doing everything they can to prepare America and prepare the world for the coming of their god. Because he will first take over human Government which Democrats worship as Savior in place of God and then he will declare himself God. And when he fulfills every Democrats’ dream by seizing complete power over the entire global economy they will worship him and take his mark on their right hands or on their foreheads.

The Antichrist will be the ultimate Savior to Democrats because he will be the ultimate Provider of what Democrats most want: big Government that will take promise to take care of everyone and everything.

And so we know from God’s Word that someone is coming – someone whom Democrats will WORSHIP – who will finish the job of bringing hell on earth.

We all know now that Obama has not merely made “ObamaCare” a giant joke, but has in fact jeopardized the entire American health care system.

What many Americans DON’T know – because we’re so busy looking at the colossal train wreck a.k.a. ObamaCare – is that Obama has similarly destroyed several other sectors of the country and the economy.

A fierce battle in New York is the latest sign that populist resistance to the Obama administration-backed Common Core education reforms shows no signs of slowing — and that the opposition isn’t limited to red states.

Since 2010, 45 states have adopted the Common Core benchmarks for proficiency in English and math for schoolchildren at the end of each grade.

Critics say several states are experiencing buyers’ remorse after complaints from parents and scholars that the reforms are untested and poorly designed and put additional burdens on teachers and students. They also say Common Core represents a federal government intrusion into an area traditionally operated at the state and local levels.

Common Core, backed by $4.35 billion offered to states through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus, appeared to be overcoming opposition when it was implemented.

Now, however, backlash has been gaining force. Blogger Michele Zipp of The Stir last week said Common Core “is kind of turning into the Obamacare of education.”

Common Core opponents have organized a social media campaign to make Monday a “National Don’t Send Your Child to School Day” and have planned protests at local education administration buildings. A Facebook page for protesters had more than 5,500 supporters by Sunday.

Opposition to Common Core has been roiling in recent weeks since New York state Education Commissioner John King conducted a series of meetings that highlighted deep concerns about the reforms.

Conservative education scholars have led opposition to Common Core reforms, but the resistance appears to have taken the Obama administration and the education establishment by surprise. The bipartisan National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have led state-by-state adoption of the standards.

“Development of these standards was not driven by the federal government, but by the states,” wrote Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “Governors on both sides of the aisle, the business community, and most importantly educators, came together to ensure one thing: that students learn what they need to live a successful life in a 21st century global economy.”

Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

The four states that have rejected Common Core completely are Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia. Minnesota has accepted the English standards but not the math standards.

But much of the energy in recent months has come from opponents, who include an unusually broad mix of scholars, teachers, parents and state legislators.

In one of the first signs of resistance, the Republican National Committee unexpectedly adopted a resolution opposing Common Core. At its spring meeting, the RNC called Common Core an “inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children so they will conform to a preconceived ‘normal.’”

Under pressure from parents, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, sent a letter last month informing Education Secretary Arne Duncan that his state was leaving Common Core, citing a “federal intrusion in education policy.”

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, also a Republican, signed the Common Core Pause Bill this year to allow deliberation among state agencies until a consensus could be reached on governmental education.

In a move that sparked sharp debate within the American church, a group of 132 respected Catholic scholars and educators released an open letter last week calling on U.S. bishops to block the Common Core standards from being imposed on the Catholic Church’s extensive network of parochial schools.

“We believe that, notwithstanding the good intentions of those who made these decisions, Common Core was approved too hastily and with inadequate consideration of how it would change the character and curriculum of our nation’s Catholic schools ,” the letter said. “In fact, we are convinced that Common Core is so deeply flawed that it should not be adopted by Catholic schools which have yet to approve it, and that those schools which have already endorsed it should seek an orderly withdrawal now.”

Other states, including Alabama, have mixed feelings about Common Core.

“I am adamantly opposed to Common Core, and I hope the Legislature will do something about it,” state Sen. Scott Beason, Gardendale Republican, said last week. “There are some people who would like to avoid it one way or another. But I believe it’s one of the biggest issues facing the Republican Party, and this is a red state.”

Let me slightly rephrase one paragraph:

Although adoption of Common Core was voluntary, states that rejected the standards were considered effectively ineligible for federal stimulus funds tied to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

To:

Although adoption of Mafia Protection was voluntary, local businesses that rejected the racket were considered effectively ineligible for mob protection tied to the mafia’s Buy Our Protection Or We’ll Firebomb Your Store initiative.

The following guest column is by Kelly Kohls. She is president of the Springboro school board and is a member of the Warren County Career Center board. She writes in opposition to the Common Core education standards.

Common Core state standards, as well as the testing called Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, are quickly becoming controversial issues in Ohio and around the country. It is not a right or left issue – both ends of the political spectrum have raised concerns.

Teachers are worried the computerization that accompanies Common Core and PARCC assessments will render them irrelevant at worst or be used to justify less pay if teachers are reduced to “coaches” for online curricula.

Folks on the political right view the assessments as a top-down take over of education by the Obama administration and some now refer to it as Obamacore.

Common Core, and the idea that all states should have a common set of national education standards, is nothing new. Common Core is the new name but it is the continuation of the education reform movement that began in the 1960s and brought us Outcome Based Education in the 1990s and Evidence Based Education in the 2000s.

Next came the implementation. To force acceptance of the standards, President Obama and his education director Arne Duncan, worked with Congress to provide over $4 billion in the form of Race to the Top grants. These grants required adoption of Common Core. […]

As the role of the federal government in education has grown, our test scores have fallen and our standing in the world has fallen with it. Ohio is moving in the wrong direction and embracing failure. Our kids deserve better.

The “Republican” governor of Ohio is also defending his decision to fully participate in the ObamaCare fiasco while actual REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS WISELY STAYED OUT OF THE HEALTHCARE ABORTION.

Here’s another one:

Parents applauded and cheered wildly when educator Beth Dimino took on New York Education Commissioner Jonathan King at a heated meeting about Common Core. She gave a powerful description of how the new Common Core test regime amounts to “child abuse”:

New York parents and teachers have been in turmoil over the new Common Core school standards, which have resulted in a 30% drop in student test scores state-wide.

A 30% drop in test scores. And do you want to know how liberals react to this fiasco?

You don’t like the fact that your kid is flunking school under ObamaCare? It’s only because you’re a) white – and therefore racist – and b) an arrogant snob who can’t accept reality for her drooling idiot kid.

You want your kid “edyoocayted”? Vote out Obama.

How else has Obama turned the whole nation into the equivalent of “ObamaCare”???

#2) Try to buy a house, or for those of you whom Obama has impoverished out of ever hoping to buy a house, try to do something else you used to be able to do like get a free checking account:

The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, sarcastically known as Dodd-Frankery and Dodd-Frankenstein, was passed into law in response to the financial crisis and recession of 2008. It contains the most drastic changes to financial regulations since the regulatory reform after the Great Depression. Proposed by Obama in 2009 and signed into law in 2010, the Democratic bill was the handiwork of former Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) in the House and former Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) in the Senate. It was supposedly going to stop banks from making loans to risky buyers who could not pay them back, reducing foreclosures. It was also supposed to change the rules so banks could no longer receive taxpayer-funded bailouts due to their poor business practices.

It hasn’t worked out the way its Democrat proponents claimed. This is because the people who got us into this mess are the same ones who drafted the law. Dodd-Frank contains more of the same things that precipitated the financial crisis; government meddling in the mortgage business and financial markets. Lobbyists for special interests carved out loopholes, resulting in merely different lists of winners and losers. As one author in U.S. News & World Report observed, “These exemptions are less about protecting unsophisticated borrowers than about protecting the taxpayer-guaranteed business models of favored entities.” Hedge funds and some other firms lost big; they are now required to fill out a 192-page form that has been estimated to cost each firm $100,000-$150,000.

Speaking of winners or losers, most outrageously, Dodd-Frank didn’t bother to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the biggest culprits for handing out mortgages to high-risk borrowers who should never have qualified for them. They received the largest bailouts of all financial institutions in 2008.

The 848-page-long act created numerous new federal agencies. It grossly expanded oversight by federal agencies to non-bank financial institutions and their subsidiaries. It required federal agencies to write 398 new rules in order to put the act’s 1,500 provisions into place. It will cost taxpayers millions to run all the new agencies and enforce the rules, and will hurt economic growth and harm the competitiveness of U.S. firms relative to their foreign counterparts.

Over 14,000 pages later, less than half of the rules have been implemented, and numerous deadlines have been missed. Imagine what would happen to employees in the private sector who repeatedly missed deadlines.

The Economist speculated that “the harm done by the massive cost and complexity of its regulations, and the effects of its internal inconsistencies, will outweigh what good may yet come from it.” Even more disturbing, “Officials are being given the power to regulate more intrusively and to make arbitrary or capricious rulings.”

Dodd-Frank came down hard on loan officers and mortgage brokers. Many mortgage brokers are expected to go out of business next year. All loan originators must now be qualified, licensed, registered, and issued a unique identifier. They are restricted from charging more than a three percent fee for all loan origination costs, which is hampering the ability of banks to offer mortgages on homes priced between $100,000 and $160,000. Many may simply shut out this working-class market.

While it superficially sounds good to impose stringent requirements and qualifications in order for borrowers to qualify for mortgages, the one-size-fits-all model really doesn’t fit everyone, and is resulting in investors gobbling up home sales, since fewer average Americans now qualify. According to real estate guru Martin Andelman, since 2009, cash sales to investors represent a third of all sales, and in some areas are responsible for up to 60 percent of all real estate transactions. This will wreak havoc on the economy when the investors all inevitably rush to start dumping houses in the future.

Homeowners are paying more for mortgages because of all the new restrictions and requirements. The regulations simply embolden lenders to work around them, working within “safe harbors” and loopholes to engage in alternative forms of risky lending. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans are exempt from the new regulations, as are timeshare loans, due to stellar lobbyists. So the Dodd-Frank cap on debt-to-income-ratio of 43 percent won’t apply to the riskiest of all loans.

The home vacancy rate is fairly high, over 10 percent, and home values have started dropping again. Around 25 to 50 percent of mortgages are still underwater. Andelman doesn’t see any decrease in foreclosures in the future. He reports that three quarters of the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and only about the top one percent have significant savings.

Banks are passing the costs of Dodd-Frank on to consumers. Dodd-Frank arbitrarily cut down on some bank fees, resulting in the banks diverting costs to customers in other ways. Since Dodd-Frank cracked down on banks charging debit card fees, the banks turned around and started eliminating free checking accounts.

Bank bailouts are still authorized, with certain banks designated as “systemically important financial institutions,” code words for too big to fail. Even worse, the government is then authorized to essentially take over the institution. Sadly, bankers don’t dare criticize Dodd-Frank publicly, or they run the risk of retaliation by the regulators.

Dodd-Frank looks a lot like campaign finance reform; lobbyist-influenced changes being made to a system that pick winners and losers, perpetuating the problem as players find ways around the regulations. It fails to address the principal causes of the 2008 meltdown: The banks made risky loans, knowing the government would bail them out once the loans went south, then sold them to murky institutions on Wall Street where they sometimes became untraceable. These derivatives were driven by a combination of Wall Street banks and politicians. Until the government stops bailing out these kinds of practices, the banks have no incentive to change their risky behavior. Dodd-Frank must be repealed.

The mainstream media has covered the fact that average Americans have largely been shut out of buying homes as investors swoop in and buy up houses. I quote an LA Times “news” piece titled in the physical paper “Investors moving to new turf” by Alejandro Lazo and appearing in the Business section on page B-1 on September 13, 2013. As is so often the case, the liberal snot rag has purged this article – but I still have the physical copy of the article:

Just last year, policymakers turned to real estate investors to rescue the housing market.

Fearing the foreclosure crisis could drag on for years, the Federal Reserve advocated renting out foreclosed homes as a market-based solution. Government-controlled mortgage titan Fannie Mae experimented with selling big pools of them to deep-pocketed buyers.

Few realized then that investors would respond with overwhelming force: Big and small players have injected billions into the market, racing one another to buy up foreclosed homes in post-crash markets. Wall Street launched a sophisticated industry based on buying and renting out homes in bulk. The suburbs of Southern California, Arizona and Nevada saw a virtual land run, creating frenzied demand that has pushed up prices more than 20% in a year.

Now the foreclosed homes in those marketsare almost gone — yet investors have kept buying, competing with individual buyers in standard sales.

The number of so-called absentee buyers, usually cash investors, has dropped slightly in Southern California since hitting a record in January. But they still account for more than 1 in 4 home purchases in the region. And just 8% of those deals were on foreclosed homes in June, compared with 25% a year earlier and a peak of 55% in February 2009.

That’s what’s going on BECAUSE OF DODD-FRANK. And oh, look, THERE’S FANNIE MAE AGAIN AT THE EPICENTER OF YET ANOTHER FIASCO.

That’s why when I see articles like this from liberal “newspapers,” I KEEP THE DAMN ARTICLES. Because when you’ve got a Big Brother like Obama, you’ve got a Ministry of Truth situation like in the novel 1984. And “stories” become “unstories.”

But again, that initial story that the Los Angeles Times in its ubersocialsm purged nevertheless failed to mention that this was because of OBAMA and HIS BIG GOVERNMENT meddling.

And that’s #3) the lowest labor participation rate since Jimmy Carter last tried to destroy America with socialism back in 1978. And just try to get a full-time job today thanks to ObamaCare hell.

We’re either going to vote out Obama and every Democrat in America, or we’re going to learn to become content with less health care for more money, less education for our children – again, for more money – and a middle class permanently frozen out of every being able to buy a home and participate in the American Dream. And over everything, fewer and fewer Americans working at all, and working part time because employers can’t afford to hire them due to ObamaCare and myriad other Obama regulations.

“I am very concerned that not enough is being done so far—very concerned. When I’m home, small businesses have no idea what to do, what to expect, they don’t know what affordability rules are, they don’t know what penalties may apply…

A lot of people have no idea about all of this.… I just see a huge train wreck coming down, and you and I have discussed this many times and I don’t see any results yet.” — Senator Max Baucus, Democrat

But allow me to quote Obama’s failed Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who was speaking about the Obama administration refusing to accept responsibility for any of the lies it directed its underlings to tell the American people when it was attempting to cover up the Benghazi fiasco before the election):

And of course, it doesn’t make any difference if ObamaCare results in the deaths of millions of Americans any more than it didn’t make any difference that Obama callously allowed the first U.S. Ambassador since the failed Carter years to be murdered under his own failed leadership.

While Obama tries to hamstring America’s ability to defend itself, he has the confidence of knowing that he was the greatest and most powerful propaganda arsenal ever assembled. He knows that the mainstream media will tell any lie and ignore any fact in order to defend their messiah and undermine their political enemies (otherwise known as “Republicans”).

He knows that he can lie over and over and over again and never be held accountable.

And so Obama knows that, in his “fundamental transformation of America” from a successful nation to a third world Marxist banana republic, he was to throw his monkey wrenches into far more than just the health care system.

Read what Obama has done to ruin America’s public education system (even more than liberals had already ruined it). And I want you to note that the description of the coming train wreck that Obama will create for our education system comes from one of the most liberal editorial boards in the entire nation:

A curriculum crunch for CaliforniaThe new Common Core State Standards are supposed to be implemented in schools in 2014. But the state is far from ready.
April 22, 2013|By The Times editorial board

While education reformers in Sacramento continue to obsess about how easy it should be to fire teachers and how important tests should be in evaluating their performance, almost no one is talking about the central issue of what students are supposed to be learning in the near future.

A sea change is coming to schools in California, one of the 45 states that have adopted what are known as the Common Core State Standards. The idea of the new standards is to bring some consistency to education from state to state, and to better prepare students for the work they’ll be expected to do in college and their jobs. Though the Obama administration couldn’t legally force new standards on states, it threatened to deny grant money under the federal Race to the Top program if they didn’t create and adopt common standards.

The standards are designed to push students to deeper levels of understanding and analysis. They call on teachers to cover fewer topics but to delve into each more thoroughly, and they discourage rote learning in favor of fuller understanding of the material. In math, for example, it might be less important for students to give the correct answer to a problem than to be able to describe the best process for reaching the solution. In California, the curriculum standards and the new tests that go with them are supposed to be implemented in the 2014-15 school year.

That’s soon, and at the rate California is going, it won’t be ready. The core curriculum standards lay out extensive guidelines about the knowledge and skills that students should master in each grade of public school, in both reading and math. But there are many complicated steps involved in turning those guidelines into a day-to-day educational plan for California schools, and the state isn’t even close to halfway through them. It hasn’t figured out how to go about training teachers, and won’t begin to adopt new textbooks — a slow and politically rancorous process — for at least two years.

What’s more, common core is expensive, requiring extensive new training for teachers, new textbooks and computers on which the new tests must be taken. It’s unclear where the state will find the money.

At the rate the state is going, teachers will end up being trained before the English curriculum is even in place, and instruction would start before the new textbooks are in anyone’s hands. Yet if the school reform movement has its way, teachers will be evaluated in part based on how well their students do on the very different standardized tests that go with the new curriculum. Reflecting the concern that teachers throughout the state have been expressing, one California teacher recently tweeted that within a couple of years, “we start testing on standards we’re not teaching with curriculum we don’t have on computers that don’t exist.”

Teachers justifiably fret that they’re being set up for failure. Schools worry about finding the money to make all this happen.

The situation led Arun Ramanathan, director of the reform organization Education Trust-West, to write a recent commentary for an education website saying: “Is this the best time for reformers to focus so much attention in Sacramento on teacher evaluation legislation incorporating student growth? Or should we be working to focus policymakers on the investments necessary to prepare all teachers to successfully teach the new standards in order to accelerate student growth?” Considering that one of Education Trust-West’s major objectives has been to include test scores in teacher evaluations, these are remarkable — and crucially important — questions.

Experts are divided over the value of the new curriculum standards, which might or might not lead students to the deeper reading, reasoning and writing skills that were intended. But on this much they agree: The curriculum will fail if it isn’t carefully implemented with meaningful tests that are aligned with what the students are supposed to learn. Legislators and education leaders should be putting more emphasis on helping teachers get ready for common core and giving them a significant voice in how it is implemented. And if the state can’t get the right elements in place to do that by 2014, it would be better off delaying the new curriculum a couple of years and doing it right, rather than allowing common core to become yet another educational flash in the pan that never lives up to its promise.

Education is health care, part deux. Obama is destroying America, entire institutions at a time.

And Obama has given us a labor participation rate that is so completely godawful that if we used the same labor participation rate as that which Bush handed over to Obama, unemployment would be measured at about 14% right now.

The labor participation rate measures the percentage of working-age Americans who are employed. And there is no question when one considers it that Obama has destroyed the American job engine (that existed in the private sector until he killed it) with his socialism, his big government crony capitalist fascist state, his war on business.

Stupid people can’t see it, I know, but THERE’S A REALLY BAD TREND going on under this demonic administration.

The fact of the matter is that Obama has cursed America with the lowest labor participation rate in American history – because in the 1970s, the labor force largely consisted of men with women largely running the households and raising the next generation. It is actually FAR worse than it was in 1979.

Obama doesn’t need intelligent, educated children. The only way he would need that would be if he were creating jobs for those children to fill. Instead, what Obama needs is more welfare dependency. Because the more America is dependent on the State, the more it will vote for Obama and traitors like him.

We need to be even MORE stupid to keep voting for the hell that we’ve voted for over the last two presidential elections. And Obama is delivering on that vapid stupidity by destroying what little “edukashun” that liberal teachers unions and Democrats hadn’t already ruined.

The beast is coming. And the same Democrats who have worshiped Obama will worship the Antichrist and take the mark of the final big-government liberal who will complete the State’s takeover of the economy. Only the most wicked and most ignorant generation in history would vote for such a thing. Which is why we need these liberal education “reforms.”

On the air and on the stump today, President Obama attacked GOP rival Mitt Romney for not embracing the idea that smaller class sizes for public school students should be a top education priority.

“When a teacher in West Philadelphia…told Governor Romney that having too many kids in his class made it harder for him to do his job, Governor Romney told him that class sizes don’t matter,” Obama said today in Las Vegas.

“There are a lot of studies that say that class sizes do matter, especially in the early grades,” he said. “Would any parent want their kids to go to a school with much bigger class sizes?”

A new Obama campaign TV ad makes the same point, portraying Romney as out of touch.

During one meeting with education reporters last year, Duncan reportedly “firmly pushed back against reflexive small-class mania,” wrote Education Week’s Rick Hess, who was there.

“He said, ‘Class size has been a sacred cow and I think we need to take it on. Give me and my wife a choice of putting our kids with a great teacher of 28 or a mediocre teacher of 23, and I know what I’d choose every time,’” Hess recounts.

“When pressed on the ‘don’t parents prefer smaller classes?’ question, Duncan said, ‘I don’t think parents have been given the choice I just put on the table…There’s no right choice there… [but] selectively raising class size’ is different from simple-minded calls for bigger classes,” according to Hess.

Other reports from Education Week show that Duncan expressed similar views even earlier in the administration, during a 2010 forum at the American Enterprise Institute.

“He urged districts to consider ‘modest but smartly targeted increases in class size,’” reported Alyson Klein, who attended the November 2010 gathering. “As a parent, Duncan said, he’d much rather have his kids in a class of 26 with a really excellent teacher, than in a class with 22 kids, lead by a mediocre teacher.”

The Romney campaign said Obama’s attacks are “misleading and hypocritical” in light of Duncan’s comments.

“President Obama’s latest ad puts him directly at odds with his own education secretary, who has promoted teacher quality — not class size — as the most important factor in a good education,” said Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg.

Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton dismissed any hypocrisy, stressing that there remains a stark contrast between the candidates on education policy.

“Secretary Duncan has said that class-size efforts should be targeted where the evidence shows they’re most effective, especially the early years,” said Hamilton, “And that the most important thing we can do is have a great teacher in every classroom.”

“That’s a far cry from that saying class sizes don’t matter or that we don’t need more teachers as an excuse to slash investments in education and shower tax benefits on millionaires and billionaires as the House Republican budget does,” he said.

We shouldn’t hear lies come out of the mouth of the nation’s top education official when he discusses the record of millions of students and dedicated educators.
People work too hard to have their work dismissed with his pathetic statement about feeling “very, very badly for the children there.”

TEA Commissioner Robert Scott emailed Duncan a sharp response last night (keep reading for text), and I’m glad he did.

The tipoff that Duncan doesn’t care about facts was his statement about “massive increases in class size in Texas” during Rick Perry’s time in the governor’s office.

Does that sound right to you — considering the fact that the 22-1 class-size cap has been in place that whole time for primary grades?

I checked TEA records on statewide class size averages. Primary grades held steady, of course, while most secondary class averages went down during the Perry years.

Examples: Secondary math classes averaged 20.3 students in 2000-01 and dropped to 18.5 by last year. Average size of secondary English/language arts classes fell from 20.2 students in 2000-01 to 17.8 by last year.

Mr. Secretary,
I have read your recent comments criticizing Texas public education, and I am disappointed that you have never raised your concerns during any of our personal conversations. If you had, I may have been able to correct any misunderstanding you have about Texas public schools and the efforts of the 333,000 teachers and the 4.8 million students who have been striving to meet increasing standards and graduation requirements.

Your pity is misplaced and demeans the hard work that is taking place in schools across Texas. Texas students are doing very well and in many cases outperforming their national peers. Since you appear to be misinformed about the achievements of Texas educators and students I would ask that you consider the following information:

— In 2009, Texas ranked 7th in a 26 state comparison of the only states reporting four-year on-time graduation rates. That year Texas’ on-time graduation rate was 80.6%. The Texas on-time graduation rate for 2010 is now 84.3%, an amazing 3.7 percentage point increase in a single year on the dropout indicator that you are now requiring all states to report to the Department.
— Texas is ranked 13th in Ed Week’s Quality Counts report. Quality Counts gave Texas an “A” in “Standards, Assessment and Accountability,” and an “A” in “Transitions and Alignment” of the Texas system with college and career readiness. This year’s graduating class is the first to graduate under Texas’ required 4×4 graduation requirements (four years of math, science, English language arts and social studies) and we are already seeing great things from the class of 2011.

— The Texas class of 2011 posted a record-high math score on the ACT college entrance exam. The Texas average math score was 21.5 and was higher than the national average of 21.1. ACT scores from 2007 to 2011 showed increases in all four subjects.

— The 2009 NAEP Science results were impressive, as well. Texas’ African American eighth-grade students earned the highest score in the nation and our Hispanic eighth-grade students were eighth. Only eighth-grade students attending the Department of Defense schools scored higher than Texas’ white students who were tied with white students in Massachusetts. On the fourth-grade test, Texas’ African American students out-performed their peers in every state accept Virginia and those students attending Department of Defense Schools. Texas’ fourth-grade white students were ranked third behind only Virginia and Massachusetts.

— We are also a leader in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. Texas has established 59 STEM schools, 7 STEM professional development centers and is a leading state in creating a national STEM network of states that want to pursue STEM education reform. Texas’ STEM reform began in 2005, long before your administration decided to model this and other aspects of your reform agenda on the efforts that have been taking place in Texas for nearly a decade.

Finally, I’m not sure where you are getting your information regarding class sizes in Texas public schools. Texas is experiencing a four-year trend of class sizes getting smaller across the board in both elementary grades and in core subjects in high school. If you would like to see the actual data, I would be more than happy to provide it for you.

As you can see, Texas has a strong record, and I am proud of the accomplishments of Texas educators and students. It is clear that they have risen to the challenge of higher standards and expectations placed before them.

Rather than simply talking about education reform, Texas policy makers, educators and students have delivered. I look forward to seeing the student performance results of your efforts to centralize more control of public education in Washington, D.C.

Robert Scott
Commissioner of Education

Not a lot more to add to that, is there?

Other than to quote Joe Wilson again: “YOU LIE OBAMA!!!”

And shame, as usual, on the mainstream media propagandists for allowing Obama’s goon to advance lies as ‘facts’ on their network.

To put it slightly differently, RICK PERRY CREATED 43% OF ALL THE JOBS THAT BARACK OBAMA HAS BEEN CLAIMING CREDIT FOR, but when the governor whose state created all those jobs enters the race, those wonderful jobs suddenly became terrible jobs. Again, because there’s something morally and intellectually wrong with Democrats.

Further, Democrats seriously need to get their lies straight. One Democrat says Perry got all his job creation from the few oil jobs Obama couldn’t destroy. Another Democrat says Perry got all his job creation from California’s liberal purge on businesses which then relocated to Texas to have a chance at success. At some point Democrats are going to have to get together and decide which massive Democrat failure to blame on Perry’s huge success.

What might be most fascinating of all is how Democrats are rabidly refusing to give Governor Rick Perry any credit whatsoever for CREATING 51.5 PERCENT OF THE NET JOB GROWTH IN AMERICA while simultaneously blaming him completely for absolutely every single problem Texas has. The same Rick Perry who deserves no credit whatsoever for all the good things that he “stumbled onto” should be blamed for every structural problem that Texas has dating back to 1846.

The big two attacks from the left against Perry center on Texas’ poverty and its ranking on education.

Take a look at this interactive map on poverty in the United States. Texas ranks 9th in poverty. But look at the states all around Texas: Louisiana ranks THIRD in poverty; New Mexico ranks fourth; Arkansas ranks fifth; Mississippi ranks first. Poverty and education are longstanding regional problems in the South Central United States that have existed for as long as America has been America. They were problems when LBJ was in Texas; they were problems when Bill Clinton was in Arkansas.

In other words, unless Democrats are out lambasting Bill Clinton for his failed Arkansas policies, it is simply nothing short of hypocritical for them to go after Rick Perry for the same sort of “failures.” Especially when they are at the same time hypocritically ignoring and trying to explain away Perry’s spectacular success at job-creation.

The Charge: The Bush campaign said on Friday that Gov. Bill Clinton “has made grand, false claims about the ineffective Arkansas welfare program he supervises. . . . After Clinton’s 12 years in office, Arkansas now suffers a state-welfare bureaucracy whose administrative costs have ballooned by 3,000% since 1983,and poverty that places the state at or near the bottom of the country in nearly every meaningful category. A full 19.8% of all Arkansas residents live below the poverty line–up from 19% in 1980.”

The Response: The Clinton campaign contends that despite a slight increase in the poverty rate in Arkansas, the state compares favorably to surrounding states. “In the last decade, Texas had an increase (in poverty) of 12.2%, Oklahoma 13.3% and Louisiana 26.3%. The numbers are a testimony to our ability to hold the line on poverty,” the campaign said.

“In hindsight, however, just about all of those high-profile moves were cosmetic, superficial endeavors that didn’t begin to tackle the underlying problems and were quickly weakened or undone. For example, the state’s first set of statewide curricular standards – called course content guides – were developed in the 1980s but rapidly proved to be inadequate” (Education Reform In Arkansas: Past and Present, pg 35).

Democrats cheered wildly when Bill Clinton – who presided over an Arkansas that was the FOURTH poorest state in the nation and the FOURTH worst in the nation in terms of its hight school graduation rate – was elected president. And that is simply dishonest of them.

Rick Perry is doing better in Texas than Bill Clinton did in Arkansas in terms of both poverty and education. And then combine that with “the Texas miracle” of job creation, and Rick Perry sure looks a lot better than Democrats want to admit.

Cato begins that article with a quote from Obama from a couple of days previous: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day… Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.”

But like virtually everything else, it was a lie. Obama’s own proposed massive increase in federal spending proved that. And since Obama took office, he has spent as no government has ever spent in the history of the human race.

And thus is it utterly no surprise at all to anyone but ignorant fools that we are now here:

By STEPHEN MOOREIf you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

California’s $500-billion pension time bombThe staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The People’s Republic of Kalifornia was cursed with a R.I.N.O. governor who championed abortion, a $6 porker giveway for stem cell research, gay marriage, and a whole bunch of other liberal crap. And the legislature is one of the most overwhelmingly Democrat in the country. And the only things that have changed is that the People’s Republic is now officially under a Democrat Governor (Jerry Brown) and they actually added a Democrat seat in the legislature.

The United States is so screwed it is absolutely unreal. And that is largely due to unions and the Democrats who support those unions in exchange for votes. It’s an unAmerican scheme that works like this: labor unions give Democrats big campaign donations and provide the muscle and infrastructure for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign. And in exchange, Democrats give unions other peoples’ money to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. They don’t give a damn about the 88% of Americans who AREN’T in unions.

Unions are parasites that have sucked the blood out of every industry they have ever seized their vile little talons onto. Autos, airlines, manufacturing, education government at every possible level – you name it; they’ve ruined it. And the rest of America is the host that the parasites feed off of. And Democrats care about the parasites, and not one damn about the rapidly dying host.

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling. […]

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie.

Every single one of these massive entitlements that is poisoning America they way Japan’s tsunami has poisoned her nuclear reactors with toxic meltdowns came from the vile minds of DEMOCRATS. And it is DEMOCRATS who will cause the once mighty America to shortly go the way of the Dodo bird.

We wouldn’t be saddled with today’s fiscal disaster. Hundreds of billions of dollars that politicians have “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund for all sorts of pork spending would not have disappeared. Instead, all that capital would have been invested in the economy, leaving us a lot more prosperous. Moreover, the Clark Amendment would have been a model for state pension plans, which are now bankrupting local governments, as well as for other nations.

There was a much better idea from the private sector – but in the end Democrats wouldn’t have it. They wanted their government fascist control instead. They didn’t care about the American people; they wanted to be able to raid those retirement funds for their own partisan ideological ends.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Medicare now represents the largest share of our unfunded liabilities today. The private market could have done a much better job at a much lower cost, but again, Democrats wanted socialism, and they were hell bent upon getting their socialism.

As we speak, Republicans are trying to cut a tiny fraction of the bloated, totally-out-of-control federal budget. And Democrats are demonizing them at every turn for it. Because Democrats have been using government spending to massively pad the coffers of the government-sector unions who make their elections possible. And to be a Democrat means you don’t give a damn about America’s future; you only selfishly want – to put it in John F. Kennedy’s famous words – “what your country can do for you.”

God HAS damned America in the person of Jeremiah Wright’s parishoner for 23 years. And the most ignorant generation in America’s history voted for it.

Obama talked about America facing a “Sputnik moment” last night. For the record, “Sputnik” was a Soviet successful satellite that stunned America out of its complacency. America entered the space race with a vengeance, and won it by a knockout. Obama exploited that moment, pointed out that America is watching the world go past us, and says we need to be competitive by pursuing massive government spending oops I mean “investment.”

But he did evoke a huge defense issue from a half-century ago—the signal wake-up security call that marked the years of transition from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, the single word that has symbolized ever since the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world: Sputnik.

“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” Obama said. As a result, we need to fund “a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the space race.”

Well, at the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech were many contradictions. And I’ll get to them. But his “Sputnik moment” thing was the worst one of all.

Allow me to cite a couple of my own articles to document just how stunningly pathetic Obama’s analogy truly is:

The first article above documents how Obama has been GUTTING the space program, and in fact RETURNING AMERICA to the pre-Sputnik vulnerability. To the disgust and open contempt of former NASA heroes. And the second documents how Obama has turned the now disgraced NASA into yet another tool for political correctness.

And to make sure you realize how pathetically laughable Obama’s analogy is, let’s make sure we understand that Sputnik was a Russian threat, and then let’s make sure we understand how Obama has helped undermine American interests to advance the Russians with yet another title:

But sadly we must take Obama seriously. Because Obama’s real political genius comes down to one simple thing: he realized that the people who support him are stupid and ignorant, don’t know a damn thing that the incredibly biased media machine doesn’t tell them, and that he can therefore spit out anything and not get caught by much of America in his deceit.

Obama is our Sputnik moment. By which I mean, this turd-in-chief and his policies are the reason that we are failing and falling behind while other nations around us rise up and overtake us.

One of the other major contradictions of Obama’s speech are that he is essentially acting as if the previous two years didn’t happen. “Nothing to see over there, folks, now if you don’t mind looking this way.” Obama is saying that we need a major new “investment” (which is a tidy euphemism for yet more government pork), when in fact he has already “invested” well over a trillion dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it but more debt and more deficits than this nation has ever seen before.

Which is why DeMint said:

When asked about President Obama’s statements about government investments, DeMint said, “Now the president is promising more spending, which he calls investments, when the time is to cut spending in Washington.. The president needs to tell the American people the truth.. That its time for the federal government to do less.”

Let’s look at Obama’s trillions in “investment” and see what effect it has had on our “competitiveness”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States spends more public and private money on education than other major countries, but its performance doesn’t measure up in areas ranging from high-school graduation rates to test scores in math, reading and science, a new report shows.

That dates back to 2003. Look before that, look after that, and the results are the same. We spend and spend and spend while our kids get dumber and dumber and dumber. To the extent that right now only a third of our kids are considered proficient in major subjects.

Here’s the problem: liberals call for more and more and more spending, but liberals make sure that all the largess goes to them, and goes to their politically connected interests. Like the liberal teachers unions that are the REAL reason our country is falling behind in education. And to the extent we spend more, we only feed the beast that is the REAL source of our dilemma and help build it into an even BIGGER problem as it uses its vast resources to protect the status quo.

Obama wants to spend billions on “green energy.” What that means is that he wants to subsidize incredibly expensive and NON-Competitive energy sources while our rivals continue to run circles around us with cheap and efficient oil and coal. And the more and the faster we spend, the more and the faster we fall behind.

The real sputnik moment, epitomized in the person of Obama himself, is this: America is spending itself into extinction. It is not wise spending, because we are sucking money out of the efficient private sector, giving to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful federal government, and then doling it out on the basis of political patronage rather than common sense.

I’ll end with this: Obama is using a “mangled multiplier” as his basis for the need for more government spending. On Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s distorted view, for every dollar the federal government spends, we get a $1.55 “bang for our buck.” But it isn’t true. Unless you really think building tunnels for turtles, bridges to nowhere and studying cow flatulence is going to make America great. On the International Monetary Fund model, which just makes more sense in addition to being less ideologically biased, we only get back 70 cents for every dollar spent. See this article for the documentation on that, and check out this graph:

In his SOTU speech, Obama provided an airplane metaphor that went:

“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”

On Obama’s metaphor, government is the engine that flies our economy. And if you reduce government spending, you eliminate the engine and the plane crashes. But that simply isn’t true; it is PRIVATE spending that flies our economy. And sucking money out of the private sector to create more government bureaucracy and more pork-barrel spending is foolhardy. It is actually OBAMA who is actually removing the engine from our economy.

If we really want to experience a “Sputnik moment” and surge back to greatness, what we need to do is wake up and vote out Obama and the Democrat Party.

Imagine the New York Times assigning a reporter to cover liberalism and the liberal agenda. They pass this reporter off as being himself a liberal, but he’s really a plant. He personally despises liberals and hates the liberal agenda, and is only on staff to sabotage the liberal movement by continually reporting a slanted picture of on only the worst aspects of liberalism.

Don’t worry, liberals. You can stop hyperventilating. Such a thing will never happen. You don’t have to worry. Every story you read will be doctrinally pure leftist propaganda.

But that is precisely what the mainstream media does to conservatives 60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and so on.

The leftwing bias and total lack of objectivity is simply unrelenting.

UPDATE | Lachlan Markay – 6/25, 3:00 PM: A roundup of reactions from all over the blogosphere and twitterverse below the fold. Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel resigned today after a host of offensive e-mails surfaced revealing his disdain for much of the right – the beat he was charged with covering. Fishbowl DC, which published a number of those emails yesterday, confirmed the resignation with the Post just after noon.

Yesterday I reported on leaked emails from Weigel to a listserve of liberal journalists bashing conservatives and conservatism – you know, the people Weigel is supposed to be covering. As bad as those email were, a plethora of messages from Weigel published in the Daily Caller take the conservative-bashing to a whole new level.

The new emails also demonstrated that yesterday’s quasi-apology from Weigel was really not as sincere as he claimed. He said that he made some of his most offensive remarks at the end of a bad day. But these new emails show that there was really nothing unique about them, and that offensive remarks about conservatives really were nothing new or uncommon.

Many of the misguided statements were clearly made in jest – “I hope he fails,” Weigel said of Rush Limbaugh after the radio host was hospitalized with chest pains, a reference to Limbaugh’s hope that Obama’s agenda would fail. But other bouts of name calling – ragging on the “outbursts of racism” from “amoral blowhard” Newt Gingrich, for instance – were obviously not jokes.

The Daily Caller revealed some quite stunning statements from the JournoList in its piece today:

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked, “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”…

Republicans? “Ratf–king [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratf–k” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratf–king tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

Weigel continued to defend these outbursts, as he did when contacted by the Daily Caller. “My reporting, I think, stands for itself,” he said. “I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway… people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”

First, there’s the issue of whether anything said on a 400-member email list can really be considered “private.” “There’s no such thing as off-the-record with 400 people,” Nation columnist Eric Alterman told Politico.

But the real issues are, first, whether such mean-spirited jabs demonstrate a disdain for many conservatives that precludes Weigel from covering them fairly (he did label gay marriage opponents “bigots,” after all), and second, whether the Post feels it is appropriate to have someone hostile to the right covering conservatism, while a through-and-through liberal in Ezra Klein covers the left.

The Post signaled that it did not consider Weigel’s comments to be a serious problem. It seems that attitude has changed.

Managing Editor Raju Narisetti told Politico that “Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism.” He added that it was “time to move on.”

The Post declined comment on Weigel’s resignation.

*****UPDATE

Below is a roundup of reactions from prominent online commentators since Weigel’s resignation.

Politico’s Ben Smith paints Weigel as an unfortunate casualty of the collapsing facade of objectivity in the Post’s online efforts.

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he’s a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he’s liberal is primarily the Post’s fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper’s brass to put him in an unsustainable position.

Having an anthropological study of conservatives, such as Dave provides, would work if the Post had a similar anthropological look at liberals from someone on the outside to balance it. As it stands, however, Post readers get a Conservatives In The Mist approach that seems to predicate itself on the belief that they can’t figure conservatives and conservatism out for themselves. That’s not a reflection on Dave, but a criticism of the editorial decision to pursue a one-sided strategy of critical analysis at the Post.

And indeed, one of the most interesting elements of the reaction to Weigel’s resignation seems to be the admission, or at least the acknowledgment, that he is, in fact, a liberal. The “libertarian” label seemed to stick.

But today, Weigel’s liberalism was treated as a given. Even Keith Olbermann, on whose show Weigel is a regular guest, tweeted his agreement: “If the WaPost didn’t know @DaveWeigel wasn’t a conservative blogger, it’s time for the Post to FOLD. My full support is yours, David.”

At the Atlantic, Jefferey Goldberg made that observation almost in passing. Goldberg went on to make what has been (somewhat surprisingly) a sparsely invoked argument in the hours since Weigel’s resignation: that the crudity of his comments itself was enough to sully his reporting.

Media consultant Josh Treviño claimed on Twitter that “nearly all journalists mock their subjects. Maybe not the ones covering elementary schools. But all the others.” But Goldberg disagrees:

“How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?” one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. “I’m not suggesting that many people on the paper don’t lean left, but there’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.”

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

Others, such as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor and National Review’s Jim Geraghty, attributed Weigel’s decline not so much to the language he used as to his style of reporting; his tenancy to seek out the fringe elements of the movement, and focus on them, rather than on mainstream conservatism.

As Gainor said in a statement today,

Weigel’s rapid meltdown showed the incredible danger for traditional media to play fast and loose mixing news and opinion. The Post was either unwilling or unable to find a neutral reporter to cover conservatives. Nor did it hire an actual advocate as it has done for the left with Ezra Klein. Instead, the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo. This disaster should be proof enough that their method was a failure.

Dave only fits the loosest definition of conservative; I think he’s best defined as a left-leaning, idiosyncratic libertarian. He is also a political junkie with a voluminous appetite for news and a dogged reporter. From where I sit, he spends too much time writing about fringe figures and trends that are largely irrelevant to national politics (Orly Taitz, Birthers, etc.) but perhaps that’s his genuine fascination and/or what his employers wanted. Righties suspected Dave wanted to spotlight the freakiest and least appealing self-proclaimed “conservatives”; I suspect that at least part of Dave’s mentality was simply, “You have got to hear what this lunatic is saying.”

Journalism is a field that basically only hires liberals. Like another liberal-dominated field – education – it basically maintains standards of ideological purity that rival the Nazi or Communist Parties in their worst days of yore. Journalism is dead in America, and liberals were the murderers.

Education is likewise dead. Like the unions that destroyed every single other industry they touched, liberals have destroyed education – turning it into leftist indoctrination – just as liberals turned journalism into leftist propaganda.

You will never see a day in which half of all reporters, journalists, and op-ed writers are conservatives. The status quo is hard-core liberalism; and the field of journalism will maintain that status quo at absolutely all costs – even as the liberal dinosaur media shrink into bankruptcy or laughably low ratings and readership.

Which means any scintilla of objectivity is a farce.

The most asinine thing of all is this notion that reporters – who are so overwhelmingly liberal it is absurd – somehow believe that they can think conservatives are not only stupid, but genuinely evil, while at the same time believing that liberals are both intelligent and virtuous, are somehow able to cover both sides fairly and objectively.

In that regard, journalists are so arrogant, and so transcendentally stupid, that it defies all rationality.

Earlier this month, I had a blogosphere argument with a liberal, who said:

I think I said it best in my post about the inferiority complex of right wingers…

As I wrote about before, much of the problem with right-wingers is an inferiority complex. They believe in the superiority of their party, but every time Republicans gain power, they make a mess of everything.

It goes beyond that, though. Most (though not all) right-wingers have achieved little in life. Few of them have a four year college degree and many have no higher education at all. When you talk about education to a right-winger, they think of grade school and high school. Talk about education to a liberal and they think about college.

It is a comment typical of elitist liberals: a worship of their own opinions, based entirely on lies.

The facts are otherwise. But when the facts get in the way of liberals’ theories, so much the worse for the facts.

You likely won’t see this poll result elsewhere, so I thought I’d highlight it here. This is a Pew Political IQ test conducted over the phone with 1,002 adults from Oct. 1-4. They were asked 12 questions, and answered an average of 5.3 questions correctly, according to Pew.

Under a section called “Partisan Knowledge Gap,” we find Republicans were more knowledgeable by a double-digit factor on four issues. Although the Glenn Beck question is naturally easier for Republicans, the other three issues are basic political knowledge— what “cap-and-trade” means, who’s in control of the House, and who the new Supreme Court Justice is (a question that should perhaps be easier for Democrats). Republicans also led Democrats on identifying the unemployment rate, Fed chairman, Dow level, Max Baucus’ position. Republicans correctly answered an Iran/Israel question and an Afghanistan question more often than Dems. Republicans and Democrats were even on identifying the “public option” as a health-care plan.

But take heart, Democrats: You lead Republicans by five points on a whopping one question.

The result is a repeat of a Pew Political IQ test conducted in March, which asked 12 slightly different questions and found Republicans more knowledgeable on 10 questions, even with Democrats on one, and lagging Democrats on just one (number of troops killed in Iraq). Those results are available under the helpful subhead, “Republicans more knowledegable,” but I don’t remember too many articles using that as a lede.

By contrast, you’ll remember copious coverage of the Democracy Corps’ focus groups under the title, “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans”— another in a long line of “conservatives are crazy” pseudo-scientific studies that are giddily regurgitated by mainstream media every year with very serious eyebrow furrows of faux objectivity.

An April 2007 Pew Quiz showed this about partisan difference: “Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high-knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least.”

A September 2007 quiz showed more Republicans than Democrats could identify even the Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

It looks like conservatives do indeed live in a separate world from liberals— one occupied by 40 percent of the American electorate, where most people know what Tim Geithner’s job is.

That’s my Stuart Smalley affirmation for our readers. After all, if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops. I figure since you get told by the media you’re crazy all the time, it’s worth telling you polling confirms you are crazy— crazy like a fox.

Posted by Mary Katharine Ham on October 28, 2009

So it’s not enough just to say that Republicans are more knowledgeable than Democrats; rather, Republicans are consistently more knowledgeable than Democrats.

Another smarmy liberal theory of innate superiority blown to smithereens.

My liberal pest confidently asserted the following as his own version of gospel truth:

It goes beyond that, though. Most (though not all) right-wingers have achieved little in life

I responded with the following facts:

What does Ben mean when he says, “Most (though not all) right-wingers have achieved little in life”? He clearly doesn’t mean success in an actual career. A Pew Research Center study from 2005 points out the following:

“It remains true now, as it was in 1992, that the more income a person has, the more likely he or she is to be a Republican, and the less income a person has, the more likely he or she is to be a Democrat.”

Well, maybe Ben was referring to characteristics of personal virtue when he talked about “accomplishment”; qualities like honesty, generosity, and morality.

Some recent surveys suggest a striking gap between liberals and conservatives on the issue of honesty. Polling by an organization called The World Values Survey posed the question, “Is it OK to cheat on your taxes?”

Fifty-seven percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said “yes”, compared with only 20 percent of those calling themselves “very conservative.” That same survey in the Washington Examiner found those on the left were more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that one knows are stolen.

Another questionnaire done by the Culture and Media Institute’s National Cultural Values Survey posed a scenario in which an employer would be willing to pay someone in cash in order to avoid taxes and allow a worker to collect unemployment benefits. Forty-nine percent of self-described progressives said they would go along with the plan, while only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

So if I’m going to argue that one group of people by political affiliation “have accomplished little in life” on the basis of fact rather than Marxist ideology – whether “accomplishment” be measured as success in one’s career or success in one’s attaining personal honor – it would be the leftwing, not the rightwing.

My liberal commenter – who couldn’t be bothered by the facts or the evidence – continued his screed against conservatives:

Few of them have a four year college degree and many have no higher education at all. When you talk about education to a right-winger, they think of grade school and high school. Talk about education to a liberal and they think about college.

Again, it would be nice if these people actually lived in the real world, rather than their world of bogus theories and opinion-as-evidence. I responded by saying:

Here’s a chart connecting education with political party that CLEARLY shows that those with the very least education OVERWHELMINGLY voted Democrat rather than Republican. The uneducated, ignorant masses Ben Hoffman tried to attribute to Republicans are in fact about four times more likely to be DEMOCRATS. In other words, it shows the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Ben falsely claims:

As I wrote about before, much of the problem with right-wingers is an inferiority complex.

A Newsmax article has some interesting things to say about this incredibly untrue statement:

“You find that all the way back to the early 1970s, as long as we’ve been keeping data on the subject, conservatives have consistently shown greater life satisfaction than liberals,” Brooks tells Newsmax.

In one study, people who identified themselves as conservative were nearly twice as likely to say they were very happy as people who said they are liberal.

In contrast, Brooks says, “Liberals are less likely to be optimistic about the future, and they’re more likely to say they feel like a failure.”

Arthur Brooks also points out:

“Generally speaking, conservatives come in two kinds: those that have conservative political beliefs throughout their lives, and those that adopt them by about the time they are in their early 30s,” Brooks says. “And you find the people who adopt conservative beliefs rather than grow up with them are people with more education. They grow up in a liberal household and are more likely to go to college. When people go to college, when people have more opportunities in life, when they become more hopeful, they get happier, and at the same time they’re getting more conservative.”

I have no doubt that liberals will continue to go on believing that they are smarter, better educated, better informed, and just plain better. But that is only because they are actually dumber, more factually ignorant, more convinced in the superiority of their own groundless opinions, more miserable, and frankly more morally inferior to their right-thinking counterparts.